MEDIA CONTACT

KEYWORDS

Newswise — The start of each new academic year is an opportunity for Indiana University's Kelley School of Business to reflect on its mission: to transform lives, organizations and society through business education and research. A study suggests that the school's research is indeed bringing about change. Kelley's combined Bloomington and Indianapolis campuses rank third in the world and No. 1 among public universities in terms of research impact.

The study, "Global Contests in the Production of Business Knowledge," published in the strategic management journal Long Range Planning gave high honors to the Kelley School. Authors Vincent Mangematin and Charles Baden-Fuller ranked institutions based on article counts, which were weighted by the citation impact rating of the journal in which each article appeared.

The authors considered 149 journals listed in the Thomson ISI database from 1992 to 2005, encompassing 65,000 articles by more than 54,000 authors.

The authors ranked the research impact of the Kelley School's two campuses separately. The Bloomington campus is 15th in the world and 15th in the United States. Among public schools, it is third in the world and in the nation. The Indianapolis campus is 56th in the world and 44th in the U.S.

If the Kelley School's Bloomington and Indianapolis' scores are combined, its research impact ranks third among U.S and world business schools. The combined campuses rank number one among public schools.

The purpose of the rankings is to compare production of important knowledge in the United States to other regions of the world and to forecast country- and school-level research productivity and impact.

Mangematin, a research professor at the University of Grenoble School of Management in France, and Baden-Fuller, a professor of strategy at the Cass Business School in London, concluded that European and Asian institutions are increasingly creating high-value research, and that thought leaders can now be found outside the United States. Their findings came out in February.

Daniel Smith, dean of the Kelley School of Business, observed, "The research mission of the Kelley School is central to our global reputation. Being an elite business school no longer means being the best among U.S. competitors, it means competing with institutions around the world.

"Kelley's focus on attracting the best researchers and students creates an environment that fosters research that advances theory and is highly relevant to business leaders,"Smith added.

Another recent comparison of research impact also ranked the Kelley School highly. The Social Services Research Network (SSRN) aims to allow scholars to easily communicate with each other at the lowest possible cost. Scholars can upload their publications to SSRN's Web site at no charge, making them instantly available to researchers around the world. A 2006 study of SSRN ranked the Kelley School fourth among public universities and 18th in the nation in terms of frequency of downloads for its research publications.

Patricia McDougall, the Kelley School's associate dean for faculty and research, said, "Attracting and retaining top research scholars in today's highly competitive global market requires a significant financial commitment from the university, as well as an environment that cultivates great ideas and great research. That dual commitment is what makes the Kelley School the No. 1 public business school in research impact."